The Doctor's Daughter

by Hilma Wolitzer

  He was so proud of her. He waltzed her around the room, calling her his “poetess laureate,” and at one of their next dinner parties there was a copy of The Jumping Frog Review, with my mother’s poem in it, rolled like a diploma and tied with red satin ribbon, at everyone’s place setting. I’d helped him to lay them out.

  “Violet,” I said now, “I feel terrible.”

  “What? You’re not sick, are you?” She grabbed my wrist, as if she were about to take my pulse.

  “No. At least I don’t think so.” We had both always enjoyed the informed hypochondria of doctors’ children. “Feel my head,” we used to say giddily to each other. “I’m burning up!”

  “Then what’s going on?” Violet asked.

  “Well, plenty. I mean, the usual. Scotty, my father, terrorism . . .” I was acutely aware of having left Ev off my list of vital concerns.

  “Yeah,” Violet said. “But what’s really getting to you?”

  “That’s the trouble, I’m not sure.” My hand went to my breast and then sank to my lap. “I just have this sense, not a foreboding, exactly; it’s as if something very bad has already happened, but I haven’t found out about it yet.”

  “Ah, the secret life of the unconscious,” Violet said, as I’d been afraid she would. “So go to a therapist. I’ll get you a name.”

  Violet was always pushing psychoanalysis—the unexamined life, blah, blah, blah. You’d think she was getting a kickback from the Freudian Society. Violet had gone into analysis, herself, after she and Eli separated. It took six years to complete, but she claimed that it saved her life, if not her marriage. That would have been really difficult to do, since Eli had fallen in love with someone else. Since then, Violet took love wherever she happened to find it, usually in brief affairs, and most recently with a married doctor she’d met at the Whitney. What would her analyst have said about that?

  I had long been resistant to the parsing of my own psyche, especially when I was writing and feared the intrusion of interpretation. I’d been in short-term therapy twice in my life, though—that time after I lost my job, and earlier, when I was about ten years old and had developed a nasty little blinking tic.

  Dr. Pinch, whose psychiatric practice was on Park Avenue, was a colleague of my father’s, making him suspect to me from the start. Each time I left his office, I imagined him picking up the phone and reporting to my parents, verbatim, everything I had just said. Not that I ever said very much. I knew I was there because of my new “habit” of blinking, but, strangely, Dr. Pinch didn’t refer to it, and neither did I.

  This was completely unlike any of my previous medical experiences. When I had an earache, my jovial pediatrician always asked me where it hurt, and then looked into the offending organ with a lighted probe. Our family dentist, appropriately, examined my teeth. Dr. Pinch, on the other hand, never mentioned my eyes.

  I was a very literal-minded child; his Dickensian name made me nervous, and why wasn’t I going to an eye doctor in the first place? He asked me seemingly irrelevant questions about magical wishes and dreams—did I ever think I didn’t live with my “real” family, did I ever daydream about having a twin?—and I blinked madly at him and mumbled grudging, monosyllabic replies. Sometimes I merely shrugged, meaning: I hate you, I don’t know, leave me alone.

  I might have told Dr. Pinch, if he’d ever asked me directly, that I blinked because I couldn’t stand looking at anything very long. But he never did ask. After several weeks, during which my parents intently ignored my tic—although my mother lost control at breakfast one morning and cried, “Sweetheart, why are you doing that to your pretty face!”—it simply went away.

  “You know I tried therapy a couple of times,” I reminded Violet, “and it didn’t do me much good. I guess it’s not my thing,” I added, realizing how much I sounded like Scott.

  “How’s Ev doing?” Violet said then, and I felt alerted in a prickling sort of way. What was she really asking or implying with that non sequitur? Had he said something to her about us? She and Ev had always liked each other, making it difficult to ever complain to either of them about the other one. When Ev and I eloped, Violet flew to Iowa to be our witness, and Ev sometimes referred to her as his best man.

  “He’s okay,” I said. “He’s fine.” We’re not, though, I thought, but didn’t say. Violet was likely to take Ev’s side, and point out that I didn’t know how lucky I was. She’d already told me more than once that I clung to some foolish fantasy of perfection, that my parents’ marriage was an impossible ideal for ordinary mortals.

  Our waitress brought our sandwiches, and I smiled up at her and said, “Thanks, that looks delicious.” As soon as she turned away, I burst into a torrent of silent sobs.

  “Honey,” Violet said. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.” I blew my nose briskly on my napkin and took a bite of my tuna melt. “Maybe I’m just having a midlife crisis.” What an easy way out that would be, to have something fleeting that everyone gets, like gas pains or nostalgia. I used a mocking tone when I said it, though, to ward off Violet’s disparagement of such a wastebasket, pop-psychology term.

  But to my surprise, she only said, “Why not? This is the crossroads, kiddo, when you’re looking back at all the mistakes you made, and ahead, well, ahead to old age and death.”

  “Thanks a lot. I knew I could count on you to cheer me up.”

  The waitress came over a couple of minutes later to refill our water glasses and ask if everything was okay. Her name was Florence; it was embroidered in script just above her pocket. She looked something like Parksie—Eleanor Parks—my father’s longtime surgical nurse. The uniform, I suppose, and that pillowy bosom. Her eyes, lined with smudged kohl, were filled with friendly sympathy. Whenever I visited my father’s office, Parksie, who doted on me, or his secretary, the serenely glamorous Miss Snow, would sit me down at her desk and give me a fan of freshly sharpened pencils and recent copies of Highlights. Goofus and Gallant. Hidden pictures. I carefully circled all the secreted items I could find: shoes in trees, monkeys in the kitchen—while my father, on the other side of the adjoining wall, illuminated X-rays to show his wary patients ominous, hidden shadows.

  I told the waitress that the food had been great, that everything was fine, a seeming contradiction, I suppose, to my half-finished sandwich and blotchy eyelids. But she smiled as if she believed me, and cleared the table.

  Then Violet and I took a taxi down to Soho, where a couple of her paintings were in a group show at a cooperative gallery. It was her turn to mind the show for a few hours, and I was going along to keep her company. Violet’s work had become more abstract over the years but no less oppressive, with its sullen colors and heavy brushstrokes. It was as if she were deliberately hiding something more aesthetically pleasing under those dense layers of pigment.

  Her paintings’ lack of compromise and consolation always made me a little anxious, and I felt like a Philistine and a traitor because I didn’t really enjoy looking at them. I couldn’t lie to Violet about it, but I couldn’t quite tell her the truth, either. When I commented at all, I used evasive, counterfeit words like intense and labyrinthine.

  “There’s enough beauty in the world,” she told Ev and me, severely, at her studio one afternoon as she showed us some new canvases. “I don’t have to add to it.” Had she read my mind?

  “But these are beautiful, Violet,” Ev told her. “The way you are.” His saying it at that moment, with such genuineness, made me feel immensely happy, as if he had said it about me.

  Our children loved Violet, too; she was the closest they came to having a cool aunt. Their only actual aunt, Ev’s brother Steve’s wife, Karen, in San Diego, was very sweet to them. She never forgot birthdays, and she sent them greeting cards on every imaginable holiday, from Purim to Presidents’ Day. But I knew that at one time or another each of them had told Violet things they weren’t able to tell Ev or me. She always treated them seriously, even when they were small, when s
he’d let them do huge, messy paintings in her studio.

  The show at One Art was an eclectic jumble of showy collages; almost invisible pen-and-ink drawings; whimsical wire sculptures; and Violet’s big, somber canvases—like a family of foster children thrown together by cruel fate.

  Soon after we arrived a man and woman came in, asked directions to another gallery, and left. I walked around the room, looking at the work, while Violet leafed through the guest book, reading some of the inscriptions aloud to me. Someone had scrawled, “Keep your day jobs!” across a whole page, which made Violet laugh. A few other people, from places like Georgetown, Texas, and DeKalb, Illinois, had written polite and positive remarks, or simply signed their names and addresses.

  But the comments were mostly from relatives and friends of the artists. “Beautiful work! We’re so proud of you! Love from Aunt Lil and Uncle Bernie.” Art critics don’t review co-op shows any more than literary critics review self-published books. It was a good thing that Violet had kept her day job, at a high-end art shop called Framework, on Lexington Avenue. And I suppose it was good that I was still working, even freelance, in my field. The major difference between us was Violet’s steadfast commitment to her painting, to her art—as essential to her true self as her prominent nose.

  Maybe not having children was the trade-off; look at Austen and Dickinson and Georgia O’Keeffe. Louise Nevelson had a son, but she handed him over to someone else to raise. I’m not convinced of the connection, though. My own kids were grown now, or nearly so, and the only writing I’d done in the past few years was in the journal I still kept in a spiral notebook, a grown-up version of my childhood diary. And even those entries were sporadic and sparse, and strewn with domestic effluvia: blue pants to cleaners, Total, milk, asparagus, Crest. I’d added a couple of hasty notes recently in my weird shorthand: “? Esm. & Scott re: Clichy.” “Visit D.!”

  Back when I still thought of myself as a writer, before I started tampering with other people’s work, I carried a notebook all the time and wrote down almost every impression I received, as if I were a recording angel assigned to keep track of the mortal world. Aunt Lil and Uncle Bernie and the Hildebrands from DeKalb were surely not the audience Violet had envisioned for her work, but it didn’t matter all that much; she painted for herself now.

  “Write the story you’d like to read,” Phil Santo used to tell us in the workshop, but we could hardly hear him over the roaring of our ambition. What happens to all that lost desire, all the language we never use? Why did the floor of my life suddenly seem to be made of glass that I might just crash through? And where was my mother when I still needed her? The room began to turn, like the dancers confined to her perfume bottle.

  “Violet,” I said. “Feel my head. I think I’m burning up.”

  4

  My father didn’t just lose his keys one day and forget what they were the next. His decline was gradual and followed an unremarkable pattern. At first he suffered from the usual complaints of the aging, like hearing loss, lethargic bowels, and hesitant urination, while his heart stampeded, although nothing much really excited him anymore. A hearing aid and a beta-blocker were prescribed, as well as medication for his prostate and blood pressure. He had retired from his surgical practice several years before, but he still did a few consultations. His reputation was intact even if his hands shook sometimes; he was, after all, the same man who’d written a landmark monograph, in 1968, on surgical intervention in bile duct blockage.

  Then we noticed that he’d begun to grope for words—“senior-itis,” he called it with a mirthless chuckle—or simply wound down in the middle of a sentence, to silence. After a while the phone calls started. My father had never cared much for the telephone; I think he considered it a “feminine ” instrument, like the hair dryer and the vacuum cleaner. He’d almost never answered the phone at home; either Faye or my mother did that, and at work it was the job of switchboard operators and medical secretaries, like his own Miss Snow, the pretty post-deb blonde who wore demure pastel twin sets and pearls, but aggressively guarded his door and his telephone extension.

  When I began to call him regularly, after his retirement, our conversations usually resembled a celebrity interview—I’d ask probing questions, and he’d give abbreviated, evasive answers. “Daddy, tell me what you did today.” “The usual.” The sense I got was that he was busy, which was good, and that he wasn’t too lonely, which was even better.

  My father did write letters over the years, though, and I’ve saved the ones he sent to me when I was away at summer camp and college. They were all handwritten on his professional stationery, and they were chatty and affectionate, and invariably signed “Your Daddy.” On my nineteenth birthday he sent greetings on a page from his prescription pad. “Rx for Alice Marion Brill, age nineteen: Take one heaping dose of happiness every day.”

  So when the telephone calls began, about three years ago, I was startled at first, and then I grew concerned. The first one came while I was at work. He’d called, it seemed, to ask me the time. He had a wonderful restored Breitling watch that my mother had given him, and a silver desk clock, with imposing Roman numerals, in his consultation room at the hospital. A cherry-wood grandfather clock reliably chimed out the hours in the vestibule of his home. Why was he asking me the time? I was busy when he called and decided that, oddly enough, he was just checking his watch’s performance.

  There was no discernible reason for the other calls, though, especially in the middle of the night, when he didn’t say anything for long seconds while I shouted “Hello! Hello!” against the possible onslaught of bad news. Once, he said, rather formally, “Forgive me, I must have the wrong number,” and hung up.

  Twenty-seven years before, not long after my mother died, people tried to fix my father up with various widows and divorcées. A couple of infatuated patients pursued him themselves. But he didn’t want to date at all; the term itself seemed distasteful to him. Marjorie Steinhorn said he’d told her that he still felt married. He continued to play bridge and have dinner with old friends, and he kept renewing his subscription to Alice Tully Hall, taking me with him, or one of the children when they were old enough. I believe that Jeremy’s interest in music began with those Sunday-afternoon concerts. He would reread the programs in bed the way Scotty reread his favorite comic books.

  It was my father’s own idea to sell the Riverdale house and move into the town house in Scarsdale. Faye had retired and gone back to North Carolina, and no one else he hired seemed to please him. He was between housekeepers when someone broke into the house while he was at the hospital. They were sophisticated thieves who’d managed to disarm the security system, and they stole many of the things he cherished, including a portrait of my mother by Alice Neel and the Egyptian prayer rugs they had bought on their honeymoon. It was as if my mother had died again—he suffered a similar impotent wrath, the same crushing grief.

  Ev and I agreed that a new, smaller place was appropriate and we helped him to settle in, with enough of his old belongings to make it feel familiar and comfortable. He especially wanted to keep his bedroom furniture and his collection of antique surgical instruments. But he relinquished other possessions with seeming ease, and he finally gave me several things that had been my mother’s, including her perfume bottle, some books and jewelry, a file box containing Faye’s recipes, and an accordion folder filled with literary memorabilia.

  One day last year I was in the office with a client when my phone rang. It was a police officer in Scarsdale, and he asked me if I knew a Samuel Elias Brill. My first gasping thought was that he had died—the somber way the officer said my father’s full name, he might have been reading it from a death certificate or a tombstone—and I realized that on some level I had expected this call for a long time, the other dropped shoe. But it was something worse. My father had left the town house in his pajamas in the early morning and wandered around his neighborhood, where he was discovered, chilled and confused, by some ch
ildren waiting for a school bus.

  Even then, I managed to find benign explanations. Bad dream. Bad medication. But the confusion came and went as erratically as his moods— rampant rage one day, utter sadness the next; two sides of the same coin. Against all of his arguments, I hired a twenty-four-hour home attendant for him, and the loss of his independence only seemed to make things worse. He told me more than once that he wished he were dead. “He’s being a drama queen again,” I’d complain to Ev, but I felt sorry for my father when I was with him.

  “You don’t really mean that, Daddy,” I said one day. “I know this is hard, but there are still lots of things you enjoy. Your music, the children . . .” I looked around his living room for further inspiration, and all I noted was the ticking clock, the silent carpeting. I gestured toward the window, the gray winter sky. “The world,” I said finally, and he said, “I’d rather be with your mother.”

  Maybe it was a mistake getting a man to care for him; someone with the same general responsibilities, but who looked like Faye, soft-eyed and brown-skinned, and wearing an apron, might have been more acceptable. Ralph Spear was a short, muscular white man with a shaved head and multiple tattoos. He reminded me of a circus acrobat. My father referred to him bitterly as “that thug” or “my keeper.” There was unarguable truth in the latter. Ralph cooked the meals and did the laundry, and he took my father to his various medical appointments. They even played chess together some afternoons, but his primary job was to keep my father safe. And one day he failed to do that.

  Ralph was making grilled cheese sandwiches for their lunch when my father said that he felt tired and was going to lie down until the sandwiches were ready. Then he went into his bedroom and locked the door behind him. Ralph heard the click of the lock all the way in the kitchen and rushed down the hallway to the bedroom. As he beat on the door, yelling, “Open up, Doc! Come on, open up!” my father took a case of old surgical instruments out of his closet, sat down on the bed, and, with a primitive scalpel, neatly cut his left wrist. My instinct to hire a strongman saved his life; Ralph broke the door open and, a few minutes later, I received that heart-stopping phone call.